This painting helped contributed to a nervous breakdown, but it's easily one of my favorites. Watercolor can be an unforgiving medium at times if you’re doing precise, detailed work. The mallards themselves were painted last as sort of a reward for a job well done.

The reference photos were taken at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland, one of the places that my daughter and I spent many hours exploring during the pandemic. I'm extremely grateful that we live in an area with such an abundance of greenspace, even in densely populated urban and suburban areas.